Cargo Records

The Horrible Truth About Burma

The posthumous live album, originally released in 1984, has never been available on CD in correct form or sequence. Botched mastering jobs and lost tapes meant that the release had to be reconstructed from scratch by Ace Of Heart’s Rick Harte.

Available for the first time in 3 years on CD, and for the first time since the 1980s on vinyl, the songs on this album were recorded during the band’s farewell tour of the US in 1982-83. The band had not recorded these songs properly in the studio. Demos and radio tapes circulated, but most people knew classics like “Peking Spring, “Dirt,” and“Tremelo,” and their covers of the Stooges’ “1970” and Pere Ubu’s “Heart of Darkness,” from the live shows. This reissue contains one unreleased track, plus a bonus DVD with the entire evening set from the final show in Boston on March 12, 1983. Remastered and restored to its correct sequence, with 3 bonus tracks. 32-page booklet containing ephemera, photos, and interviews with the band on the making of the album. Vinyl is HQ-180 pressing at RTI; thick Stoughton gatefold sleeve, tipped-in booklet, DVD, MP3 c o u p o n “Combining rock 'n' roll's traditional fetish for pure, unmediated feeling, with a more modern sort of artistic calculation, Burma's music could evoke everything from the Beatles' ecstatic run of Hamburg rock clubs in the early '60s to the lightning-speed hardcore punk - so fast it often seemed more like avant-garde art music than rock 'n' roll - that was developing in the U.S. during Burma's tenure. In this sense, Burma can be said to have blithely encapsulated punk's overarching mission: to draw a line connectrock rebels past and present, and, in doing so, re-imagine and re-establish the music's anarchic condition.”

Track Listing

1 Tremolo
2 Peking Spring
3 Dumbells
4 New Disco
5 Dirt
6 Go Fun Burn Man
7 1970 8 Blackboard
9 He Is, She Is
10 Heart Of Darkness
11 That's When I Reach For My Revolver
12 Weatherbox
13 Trem Two
14 Learn How